Obvious/Apparent Discrepancies

This week my lectio divina includes the raising of the leader’s daughter (he isn’t identified as Jairus here and some manuscripts don’t even say he was a synagogue leader) and the healing of the woman with the hemorrhage in Matthew 9:18-26. Matthew’s version is much more compact than Mark 5:22-43 and Luke 8:41-56.  (This is not recorded in John’s Gospel, no surprise there.) Starting out with curiosity, I have been looking at all three versions of this story. The more I looked, the more aware I became of the inconsistencies between them. (You can make your own inventory.) I have to say that I am not particularly interested in compressing them in an attempt to make a single, harmonious narrative, nor am I interested in explaining away the obvious/apparent discrepancies. This observation does not at all undermine my confidence in the Gospel accounts. Rather, I am fascinated by each Gospel’s perspective and pondering each writer’s focus. But even deeper, I am finding that by, as it were, staring unswervingly into the spaces between these accounts I am relishing and exploring mystery beyond my rational capabilities.

For me, gazing into the spaces between the juxtaposed variations in these three accounts of the same event is something akin to an Eastern Orthodox icon. Not a picture to look at, but a window to look through to be encountered by a spiritual reality beyond that may be more mysterious than may be amenable to being reduced to human language. The drive to make all of the details match seems to me to be a very Western, post-Enlightenment elevation of human rationalism that is inadequate for encountering the full scope of reality or being encountered by the numinous.